Thank you for your well written argument. I do believe, however, there is a pretty big hole in it. That is, you, and many other people, have this belief that things will be in fact, ok, if we just reduce our CO2 emissions. I have doubt that we are adding more CO2 to the atmosphere and that we've changed the climate. However, what I also know is that the assumption of a linear behavior in global CO2 is not well founded. The math itself is highly non-linear, a bunch of differential equations, and so, from that, we can conclude that whatever we've done to the climate, its done, and there's NO GOING BACK to what we had before.
From a physical perspective, our little adjustment to the CO2 level of the air has had so many effects that we haven't even begun to measure them. For all we know, we've adjusted the balance of different kinds of air processing forms of life, (there is a mass extinction event going on), we've altered the geology of the planet, and, as a consequence, perhaps changed or set in motion a set of changes that effect the rate and frequency of things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. While it matters if all the greenland ice sheet melts, or antarctica melts, or the south pole melts, it could also matter a lot more if some change in the depth and distribution of ground water changes pressures in magma changes around the globe. What if a bunch of water is seeping into the yellowstone super volcano, or just enough to change the composition of the rock holding down that super volcano? We have absolutely no idea what we've done, and to just pretend that we can go and stop doing something in hopes the earth will "fix itself" with respect to what we want sounds rather foolish.
Interestingly, your own argument about CFCs and the Ozone hole bears this out - as of right now, we have no proof that changing the rate of emissions will actually undo whatever changes we made. Let's restate that: if I adopt your point of view that says that the ozone layer didn't change in any measurable despite a decades worth of CFC reduction, then, so goes with it the only proof we have that adjusting the rate of emissions of something into the atmosphere can even work at all.
It follows then, from here on out, we have to actively manage the composition of the atmosphere. The good old days of hoping the earth will work out ok are gone. We have to have a rate of change that is much, much faster than the centuries of change that you describe, and we need to be able to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and on a massive scale.
If you only reduce emissions, you do not guarantee anything, and therefor, CO2 taxes, unless applied to the construction of massive atmospheric management facilities, are a complete waste of time. The math suggest that reduction won't work, and we have no proof that it will, either.
According to the latest data, there is no such trend. Thanks for trolling
Care to bet on that? If I go and post the historical ozone hole area figures, for each measured year, and they say a downward trend, what would that tell you?
of CFCs is equivalent to 5,897 tons of CO2 as far as that's concerned
Scientifically speaking, isn't that a bit too many significant digits for that kind of measurement? I mean, it might work out numerically that way, but, I have the sneaking suspicion that the number might be a lot different depending on conditions, how its made, etc.
Scientists do not extrapolate any news if they only have 1 data point. That's why it said the news were not setting a trend - premature to know if it is a sign of healing or something else.
I would be willing to bet that there are enough measurements of the size of the ozone hole to determine if a statistical trend is there. Every year, the ozone hole has been shrinking somewhat. It just has been. If anything, there are probably nearly as many measurements made of the ozone levels as there are of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. If you can draw a hockey stick on one, then you should be able to draw some kind of shape on the other, and from there, make an educated guess as to the cause. That they say there is not enough data is dishonestly, honestly, because there's always enough data to make some kind of a guess, and that data can be tested. In other words, the statement they made is political, and not scientific.
While Global Warming or Evolution are accepted scientific facts at the moment, people that know squat will still yell and shout mostly because it affects their *beliefs*
I'm still waiting for people to explain how taxing carbon dioxide will actually remove it from the atmosphere. All these GW people can run around as much as they want, calling everyone a luddite for not signing onto this give the third world a giant check project of theirs, but at the end of the day, the full text of the Kyoto or any other carbon treaty has absolutely nothing to say about the construction of means to clean carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Period.
Given that level of dishonesty, and the number of scientists who have signed onto that nonsense, I'd say the intelligent thing to do is to question every fact that they come up with, especially when it is so politically loaded. Great, the ozone layer is going down, and I can check the measurements, but don't tell me that you can't form a guess as to why, because, you can. There's always enough data to guess and always enough science to check any guess.
If the antartic ice sheet melts faster than predicted, some folks say, with convinction, that its proof that humanity has finally done in poor mother earth, and that we are all doomed. Now, we get a piece of good news, that the ozone hole is actually healing up, and that can't possibly be because humanity did something right.
Worst of all, we're probably going to find down the road that, because the ozone hole closed up, a bunch of carbon producing bacteria that would have otherwise been killed due to UV radiation have now lived, making the earth's carbon burden even worse. Or, perhaps, more oxygen producing bacteria live, making things better. Either way, the ozone hole closing will cause somme other climate change, just as we now find that regulations on the size of particulates in pollution actually made global warming worse.
With all these downsides to cleaning up the environment, I almost think we need to find few brave politicians willing to come out for oceanic dumping of nuclear waste, just to balance things out. Godzilla: wake up, damn you!
normal check boxes are buttons, and to get a click needed to check or uncheck the box, windows waits for a mouse button up message. So, if you have ten things you want to check or uncheck, you can't just drag the mouse across and check them all, and you would have to click ten times. my checkbox, on the other hand, allowed you to drag through a bunch of bunch of items, and it looks like ibms does too.
Slashdot censors. Given the community, the whole moderation system serves to censor posts that are politically to the right. Someone can write: "given the evil republican and its bloodthirsty attempts to dominate humanity", and be modded +5 insightful, or, someone can write: "the evil democrat and its bloodthirsty attempts to dominate humanity", and be modded -1 Troll.
In fact, I routinely game the thing, posting left leaning pieces to bring up my karma, and, then, once I get up there, something really far to the right, just to piss everyone off. When my karma gets whacked, I go and post a few things about how we need to love our fellow baby seals until I get that +1 modifier, and, then, its off to the race with how baby seals suck and their heads are perfectly shaped for clubbing. Either that, or I'm just manic depressive.
The point is not to say that slashdot is evil and AT&T are evil. It's really to say that every organization has some right to police itself with its own property. If you don't like the moderation of Slashdot, then don't use it, and if you don't like the censorship of AT&T, then don't use it either.
That is a mighty long "discussion" about your own failure to comprehend the issue. blah blah blah blah...
My post was a joke dude! Obviously, you failed to comprehend that! I would have thought if the very idea of making George Bush the head of the EU didn't give it away, then the idea of everyone in Europe wearing a confederate flag t-shirt, singing Sweet Home Alabama, surely would.
I used Folio Views a long time ago for a litigation support project. To really pull it off, I had to back it with an RDBMS. So, I had a full text search using the Folio Views, and then, an RDBMS to do meta deta searches. All the documents were supplied as both plaintext and as OCR. Paralegals coded the RDBMS portion as part of the document review, and the OCR was fed into a Folio Views NFO. The thing is, the NFO was really only good for static datasets... you took all of your text, built a sort of a hyperlink system onto it using FolioViews proprietary tags, and then, you were off to the races. The full text search, though, was really good.
Were I able to do it again, today, and I had plaintext, I'd probably be tempted to drop the whole lot directly into the database. Oracle and SQL Server both have some sort of a full text search thing you can get, although I've never used either. But that way, you could build queries that went against both the meta data and the document text at the same time.
I have a version of my shareware program, called Commodity Server, which does this already. The idea is that you can sorta paint the checks in the boxes.
Markey is a total socialist. He'll take any chance he can get to go after a business, until everyone is unemployed and has to get a job working for the super-government.
All we hear about from the Europeans and their American Left Wing Lackeys (no doubt paid) is that Bush is a wanna be Hitler, hell bent on exterminating everyone's civil rights, whereas Europe is the enlighted fount of all freedom to the world. I think a critical examination will reveal that George Bush is the most pro-freedom head of state of any of the major industrialized nations. If Europeans and Americans value freedom, then we need to amend the US Constitution so that he can have a third term, or, perhaps make Mr. Bush the President of the European Union.
Bush draws criticism for the USA PATRIOT Act, but, in the United Kingdom, I think, has more cameras in the city of London than the USA has on the North American Continent. Now we find that the UK will throw people in jail for refusing to turn over keys, something that is unconstitutional under the American Bill of Rights (The 5th Amendment). George Bush wouldn't do that, unless they were islamic, and the vast majority of Christian citizens of the west need not be concerned.
In France, an investigating judge has essentially the same powers as an American prosecutor and a judge rolled in together, and no major European country has the American notion of double jeopardy - where a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. In fact, George Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court have NEVER tried a criminal case twice for the prosecution.
European lawmakers contemplate banning all engines over 3 liters in displacement, but in America, a 6 liter V8 is a constitutional right, thanks to George Bush.
Europe does not have the fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Go ahead and try a Bushmaster XM15E2S in France or the United Kingdom. But, you can buy one in Delaware, USA, thanks to George Bush's timely repeal of the oppressive assault weapons ban.
The record on taxes too, is all Bush. George Bush has consistently pushed for lower taxes - meaning more freedom, lower environmental regulations (meaning more freedom). George Bush is condemned for his sphinx-like opposition to silly carbon taxes, but those same critics never seem to say exactly what machine will be built to clean up the atmosphere with that money. They know that their brothers are going to get new decks with that money.
Honestly, if I have to choose freedom, I would prefer George Bush any day of the week over any head of European State. I don't like what Bush did with the USA Patriot act, but I think any balanced opinion over civil rights and freedoms for the majority people will find, upon any serious examination, that the majority will get more freedom under George Bush and the Republican Party than any other European Party or State would.
My advice to Europeans, then, would be to assert your freedom in the most fundamental way : break out your confederate flag, and wear a nice t-shirt with a picture of George Bush, and proudly say in solidarity, "I'm a Republican Too"
Here's the song you need to learn. Put some gasoline in the rag and pass it along.
Sweet Home Alabama
Big wheels keep on turning Carry me home to see my kin Singing songs about the Southland I miss Alabamy once again And I think its a sin, yes
Well I heard mister Young sing about her Well, I heard ole Neil put her down Well, I hope Neil Young will remember A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama Where the skies are so blue Sweet Home Alabama Lord, I'm coming home to you
In Birmingham they love the governor Now we all did what we could do Now Watergate does not bother me Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth
Sweet home Alabama Where the skies are so blue Sweet Home Alabama Lord, I'm coming home to you Here I come Alabama
Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers And they've been known to pick a song or two Lord they get me off so much They pick me up when I'm feeling blue Now how about you?
Sweet home Alabama Where the skies are so blue Sweet Home Alabama Lord, I'm coming home to you
Sweet home Alabama Oh sweet home baby Where the skies are so blue And the governor's true Sweet Home Alabama Lordy Lord, I'm coming home to you
People who expect that a GPL consumer will somehow "give back" to the beyond what the license requires are foolish. Businesses do not exist to deliver welfare to developers. If you want software to be free, then you have to understand that you aren't going to get any money for it. You just aren't.
I imagine that in some future GPL, we'll start to see some sort of a redistributive tax for software, based on the logic that, well, the software is existing, therefor, people should be required to support the free community. There will be some uber commission designed to dole out revenues to the most worthy projects (aka politically connected and politically correct).
And, all along, people that who have said that the GPL is a socialist system will be redeemed.
most immigrants learn english, and the vast majority of children of immigrants learn english, by the third generation it's uncommon to end up much more fluent in the grandparent's language than people who take it as a language requirement in HS/college.
30 years ago, I'd say that was true. But now? Why learn english when every good and service in the USA is effectively bilingual. There's no need to learn english, and, if you start building bilingual schools, then, there is no need for kids to learn english either.
Even advertisements for cars during football games are bilingual. I saw a Dodge advertisement in spanish during Monday Night Football. That's NEVER happened before.
That always semed a bit hysterical. Was there any evidence to that, or were the pundits just insane?
Actually, I was joking around, but, you could make a case for it:
a) There's no requirement to learn english in the USA - everything is in mixed english / spanish anymore. b) spanish speaking immigrants have a much higher birthrate than do other minorities. In fact, other minorities are barely keeping on a sustainable level.
So, you take the trend that there will be little adoption of english by the immigrant minority, realize that they have the higher birthrate, and what do you get? If its reasonable to extrapolate out environmental fears by a couple decades, if not centuries, then why would it be hysterical to apply the same trends in languages out by a few generations.
Christ, if Bush really was a neocon as half as bad as the left makes him out to be, that anti-America traitor Soros would have had his head on a pole by now.
As far as I'm aware, the Church was not concerned with technology in and of itself
That's true to a point. The Church's interest in technology was to understand its theological implications before it would really adopt a position on it. To wit, the Church had the idea that all knowledge could bit fit together in a single integrated whole. Back in the day, the Church saw the Bible as a backing to an oral tradition, so, it could always modify the oral tradition to clarify the Bible as needed. With that in place, they would then try and think through the implications of everything in order to ensure that their congregration would remain on the path to God.
The undoing of the Church, of course, was really that technology came too fast and at a time when consumers wanted it to change. Of course, there were other factors as well. The disasters of the Black Death (1389) and the Great Schism both put the Church on wobbly ground. In the former case, the Church had no real answers in the face of so much death, and in the latter, it appeared, with multiple Popes running around, that the Church couldn't get its act together. And, of course, too many preachers had too many hands in the cookie jar - the wealth, the concubines, and other worldly trappings irritated a great many people. All of these things, undermined the core claim of the Church, and, to many people, it seemed that the Church really had no right to make any sort of judgement on technology at all.
Thus, the renaissance ensued, and with it, mankind took one step forward and, it now seems, one step back. The step forward was that technological adoption would no longer be slowed by an introspective and analytical type of people - the idea that the users of the technology would decide if it was worthy. Free trade and capitalism were ultimately born of an extension of this idea, that economic systems should be geared to giving as many people technology as possible. Guilds, and later unions, would all be swept away, and the rapidity of the adoption of technology is the sole means by which a man's modernity is judged. Those who would question a technology, are harshly judged.
This is just how guilds worked in Europe from about 800 AD until the industrial revolution...These were very meritocratic groups. Those who truly excelled would often form their own guilds, drawing talent away from the existing guild. Essentially, it's what we've seen in Silicon Valley over the past century.
Well, no. The guild system existed to restrain the flow of ideas and competition. The idea of the guild was to control all the knowledge in a particular craft to reduce competition. If you were in a glassblowers guild, you did not tell someone else how to blow glass, and you also worked to try and control production so that too much glass was not blown. So, they restrained knowledge and restrained trade. To some extent, the guilds also shared a common interest with the church. The guilds didn't want too much technological advance, and neither did the church, as the pace of change could well mean a loss of power for both, and ultimately did.
What killed the guilds? Free trade and the emergence of nation states over city states. The idea of copyrights and patents were promulgated by the emerging central governments to kill two birds with one stone. First, was to break the guilds, and the second, was promote freer trade. The idea of state funded educational centers did not help the guilds either. It actually wasn't that hard to learn how to blow some basic level of glass, for example, and so, once the guild system was broken, industrialization could take place, bringing further revenues to the crown. In this sense, craftsmen of the guilds began the transformation to employees of an emerging industry. It would take the idea of using investment capital to buy industrial machines that would ultimately make that transformation complete, so, in a sense, when Andrew Carnegie sent the Pinkertons in, he was ultimately breaking the guild system once and for all.
The emergence of labor unions, to a degree, could be seen as a response to the breaking of the guild system. Except that, labor unions could never monopolize knowledge of a particular skill the way the guilds did, because the companies owned all the big machines that needed to be learned (and they were rapidly obsolete anyway), and had to turn to other arguments to try and monopolize labor.
Microsoft open a development center in Vancouver because of Visa problems for foreign workers
One wonders why Microsoft would even bother. The USA is awash in illegal immigrants, and your Danish friend, Microsoft, and the United States at large would have been better off had your Danish friend just blown off the H1-B process and just got a job as an illegal alien.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for your well written argument. I do believe, however, there is a pretty big hole in it. That is, you, and many other people, have this belief that things will be in fact, ok, if we just reduce our CO2 emissions. I have doubt that we are adding more CO2 to the atmosphere and that we've changed the climate. However, what I also know is that the assumption of a linear behavior in global CO2 is not well founded. The math itself is highly non-linear, a bunch of differential equations, and so, from that, we can conclude that whatever we've done to the climate, its done, and there's NO GOING BACK to what we had before.
From a physical perspective, our little adjustment to the CO2 level of the air has had so many effects that we haven't even begun to measure them. For all we know, we've adjusted the balance of different kinds of air processing forms of life, (there is a mass extinction event going on), we've altered the geology of the planet, and, as a consequence, perhaps changed or set in motion a set of changes that effect the rate and frequency of things like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, etc. While it matters if all the greenland ice sheet melts, or antarctica melts, or the south pole melts, it could also matter a lot more if some change in the depth and distribution of ground water changes pressures in magma changes around the globe. What if a bunch of water is seeping into the yellowstone super volcano, or just enough to change the composition of the rock holding down that super volcano? We have absolutely no idea what we've done, and to just pretend that we can go and stop doing something in hopes the earth will "fix itself" with respect to what we want sounds rather foolish.
Interestingly, your own argument about CFCs and the Ozone hole bears this out - as of right now, we have no proof that changing the rate of emissions will actually undo whatever changes we made. Let's restate that: if I adopt your point of view that says that the ozone layer didn't change in any measurable despite a decades worth of CFC reduction, then, so goes with it the only proof we have that adjusting the rate of emissions of something into the atmosphere can even work at all.
It follows then, from here on out, we have to actively manage the composition of the atmosphere. The good old days of hoping the earth will work out ok are gone. We have to have a rate of change that is much, much faster than the centuries of change that you describe, and we need to be able to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and on a massive scale.
If you only reduce emissions, you do not guarantee anything, and therefor, CO2 taxes, unless applied to the construction of massive atmospheric management facilities, are a complete waste of time. The math suggest that reduction won't work, and we have no proof that it will, either.
IS it really that the DX10 gives you the ability to stuff more complex code into shaders?
According to the latest data, there is no such trend. Thanks for trolling
Care to bet on that? If I go and post the historical ozone hole area figures, for each measured year, and they say a downward trend, what would that tell you?
of CFCs is equivalent to 5,897 tons of CO2 as far as that's concerned
Scientifically speaking, isn't that a bit too many significant digits for that kind of measurement? I mean, it might work out numerically that way, but, I have the sneaking suspicion that the number might be a lot different depending on conditions, how its made, etc.
Scientists do not extrapolate any news if they only have 1 data point. That's why it said the news were not setting a trend - premature to know if it is a sign of healing or something else.
I would be willing to bet that there are enough measurements of the size of the ozone hole to determine if a statistical trend is there. Every year, the ozone hole has been shrinking somewhat. It just has been. If anything, there are probably nearly as many measurements made of the ozone levels as there are of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. If you can draw a hockey stick on one, then you should be able to draw some kind of shape on the other, and from there, make an educated guess as to the cause. That they say there is not enough data is dishonestly, honestly, because there's always enough data to make some kind of a guess, and that data can be tested. In other words, the statement they made is political, and not scientific.
While Global Warming or Evolution are accepted scientific facts at the moment, people that know squat will still yell and shout mostly because it affects their *beliefs*
I'm still waiting for people to explain how taxing carbon dioxide will actually remove it from the atmosphere. All these GW people can run around as much as they want, calling everyone a luddite for not signing onto this give the third world a giant check project of theirs, but at the end of the day, the full text of the Kyoto or any other carbon treaty has absolutely nothing to say about the construction of means to clean carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Period.
Given that level of dishonesty, and the number of scientists who have signed onto that nonsense, I'd say the intelligent thing to do is to question every fact that they come up with, especially when it is so politically loaded. Great, the ozone layer is going down, and I can check the measurements, but don't tell me that you can't form a guess as to why, because, you can. There's always enough data to guess and always enough science to check any guess.
If the antartic ice sheet melts faster than predicted, some folks say, with convinction, that its proof that humanity has finally done in poor mother earth, and that we are all doomed. Now, we get a piece of good news, that the ozone hole is actually healing up, and that can't possibly be because humanity did something right.
Worst of all, we're probably going to find down the road that, because the ozone hole closed up, a bunch of carbon producing bacteria that would have otherwise been killed due to UV radiation have now lived, making the earth's carbon burden even worse. Or, perhaps, more oxygen producing bacteria live, making things better. Either way, the ozone hole closing will cause somme other climate change, just as we now find that regulations on the size of particulates in pollution actually made global warming worse.
With all these downsides to cleaning up the environment, I almost think we need to find few brave politicians willing to come out for oceanic dumping of nuclear waste, just to balance things out. Godzilla: wake up, damn you!
normal check boxes are buttons, and to get a click needed to check or uncheck the box, windows waits for a mouse button up message. So, if you have ten things you want to check or uncheck, you can't just drag the mouse across and check them all, and you would have to click ten times. my checkbox, on the other hand, allowed you to drag through a bunch of bunch of items, and it looks like ibms does too.
Slashdot censors. Given the community, the whole moderation system serves to censor posts that are politically to the right. Someone can write: "given the evil republican and its bloodthirsty attempts to dominate humanity", and be modded +5 insightful, or, someone can write: "the evil democrat and its bloodthirsty attempts to dominate humanity", and be modded -1 Troll.
In fact, I routinely game the thing, posting left leaning pieces to bring up my karma, and, then, once I get up there, something really far to the right, just to piss everyone off. When my karma gets whacked, I go and post a few things about how we need to love our fellow baby seals until I get that +1 modifier, and, then, its off to the race with how baby seals suck and their heads are perfectly shaped for clubbing. Either that, or I'm just manic depressive.
The point is not to say that slashdot is evil and AT&T are evil. It's really to say that every organization has some right to police itself with its own property. If you don't like the moderation of Slashdot, then don't use it, and if you don't like the censorship of AT&T, then don't use it either.
That is a mighty long "discussion" about your own failure to comprehend the issue.
blah blah blah blah...
My post was a joke dude! Obviously, you failed to comprehend that! I would have thought if the very idea of making George Bush the head of the EU didn't give it away, then the idea of everyone in Europe wearing a confederate flag t-shirt, singing Sweet Home Alabama, surely would.
I used Folio Views a long time ago for a litigation support project. To really pull it off, I had to back it with an RDBMS. So, I had a full text search using the Folio Views, and then, an RDBMS to do meta deta searches. All the documents were supplied as both plaintext and as OCR. Paralegals coded the RDBMS portion as part of the document review, and the OCR was fed into a Folio Views NFO. The thing is, the NFO was really only good for static datasets... you took all of your text, built a sort of a hyperlink system onto it using FolioViews proprietary tags, and then, you were off to the races. The full text search, though, was really good.
Were I able to do it again, today, and I had plaintext, I'd probably be tempted to drop the whole lot directly into the database. Oracle and SQL Server both have some sort of a full text search thing you can get, although I've never used either. But that way, you could build queries that went against both the meta data and the document text at the same time.
I have a version of my shareware program, called Commodity Server, which does this already. The idea is that you can sorta paint the checks in the boxes.
Markey is a total socialist. He'll take any chance he can get to go after a business, until everyone is unemployed and has to get a job working for the super-government.
All we hear about from the Europeans and their American Left Wing Lackeys (no doubt paid) is that Bush is a wanna be Hitler, hell bent on exterminating everyone's civil rights, whereas Europe is the enlighted fount of all freedom to the world. I think a critical examination will reveal that George Bush is the most pro-freedom head of state of any of the major industrialized nations. If Europeans and Americans value freedom, then we need to amend the US Constitution so that he can have a third term, or, perhaps make Mr. Bush the President of the European Union.
Bush draws criticism for the USA PATRIOT Act, but, in the United Kingdom, I think, has more cameras in the city of London than the USA has on the North American Continent. Now we find that the UK will throw people in jail for refusing to turn over keys, something that is unconstitutional under the American Bill of Rights (The 5th Amendment). George Bush wouldn't do that, unless they were islamic, and the vast majority of Christian citizens of the west need not be concerned.
In France, an investigating judge has essentially the same powers as an American prosecutor and a judge rolled in together, and no major European country has the American notion of double jeopardy - where a person cannot be tried twice for the same crime. In fact, George Bush's appointees to the Supreme Court have NEVER tried a criminal case twice for the prosecution.
European lawmakers contemplate banning all engines over 3 liters in displacement, but in America, a 6 liter V8 is a constitutional right, thanks to George Bush.
Europe does not have the fundamental right to keep and bear arms. Go ahead and try a Bushmaster XM15E2S in France or the United Kingdom. But, you can buy one in Delaware, USA, thanks to George Bush's timely repeal of the oppressive assault weapons ban.
The record on taxes too, is all Bush. George Bush has consistently pushed for lower taxes - meaning more freedom, lower environmental regulations (meaning more freedom). George Bush is condemned for his sphinx-like opposition to silly carbon taxes, but those same critics never seem to say exactly what machine will be built to clean up the atmosphere with that money. They know that their brothers are going to get new decks with that money.
Honestly, if I have to choose freedom, I would prefer George Bush any day of the week over any head of European State. I don't like what Bush did with the USA Patriot act, but I think any balanced opinion over civil rights and freedoms for the majority people will find, upon any serious examination, that the majority will get more freedom under George Bush and the Republican Party than any other European Party or State would.
My advice to Europeans, then, would be to assert your freedom in the most fundamental way : break out your confederate flag, and wear a nice t-shirt with a picture of George Bush, and proudly say in solidarity, "I'm a Republican Too"
Here's the song you need to learn. Put some gasoline in the rag and pass it along.
Sweet Home Alabama
Big wheels keep on turning
Carry me home to see my kin
Singing songs about the Southland
I miss Alabamy once again
And I think its a sin, yes
Well I heard mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A Southern man don't need him around anyhow
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
In Birmingham they love the governor
Now we all did what we could do
Now Watergate does not bother me
Does your conscience bother you?
Tell the truth
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
Here I come Alabama
Now Muscle Shoals has got the Swampers
And they've been known to pick a song or two
Lord they get me off so much
They pick me up when I'm feeling blue
Now how about you?
Sweet home Alabama
Where the skies are so blue
Sweet Home Alabama
Lord, I'm coming home to you
Sweet home Alabama
Oh sweet home baby
Where the skies are so blue
And the governor's true
Sweet Home Alabama
Lordy
Lord, I'm coming home to you
The descendants of recent immigrants to the USA are adopting English and losing their native language at a faster rate than in the past
Then why is everything bilingual?
People who expect that a GPL consumer will somehow "give back" to the beyond what the license requires are foolish. Businesses do not exist to deliver welfare to developers. If you want software to be free, then you have to understand that you aren't going to get any money for it. You just aren't.
I imagine that in some future GPL, we'll start to see some sort of a redistributive tax for software, based on the logic that, well, the software is existing, therefor, people should be required to support the free community. There will be some uber commission designed to dole out revenues to the most worthy projects (aka politically connected and politically correct).
And, all along, people that who have said that the GPL is a socialist system will be redeemed.
Just annex Mexico. Make it a state. Solve all the problems with border incursions and all that. Cheaper in the long run too!
And loads of oil too.
most immigrants learn english, and the vast majority of children of immigrants learn english, by the third generation it's uncommon to end up much more fluent in the grandparent's language than people who take it as a language requirement in HS/college.
30 years ago, I'd say that was true. But now? Why learn english when every good and service in the USA is effectively bilingual. There's no need to learn english, and, if you start building bilingual schools, then, there is no need for kids to learn english either.
Even advertisements for cars during football games are bilingual. I saw a Dodge advertisement in spanish during Monday Night Football. That's NEVER happened before.
That always semed a bit hysterical. Was there any evidence to that, or were the pundits just insane?
Actually, I was joking around, but, you could make a case for it:
a) There's no requirement to learn english in the USA - everything is in mixed english / spanish anymore.
b) spanish speaking immigrants have a much higher birthrate than do other minorities. In fact, other minorities are barely keeping on a sustainable level.
So, you take the trend that there will be little adoption of english by the immigrant minority, realize that they have the higher birthrate, and what do you get? If its reasonable to extrapolate out environmental fears by a couple decades, if not centuries, then why would it be hysterical to apply the same trends in languages out by a few generations.
In neocon America you mean.
Christ, if Bush really was a neocon as half as bad as the left makes him out to be, that anti-America traitor Soros would have had his head on a pole by now.
A few decades from now, we'll all be speaking spanish!
Going around and trying to drum up a class action where non exists is a tad unethical. One wonders if this guy used to work for Milberg Weiss.
As far as I'm aware, the Church was not concerned with technology in and of itself
That's true to a point. The Church's interest in technology was to understand its theological implications before it would really adopt a position on it. To wit, the Church had the idea that all knowledge could bit fit together in a single integrated whole. Back in the day, the Church saw the Bible as a backing to an oral tradition, so, it could always modify the oral tradition to clarify the Bible as needed. With that in place, they would then try and think through the implications of everything in order to ensure that their congregration would remain on the path to God.
The undoing of the Church, of course, was really that technology came too fast and at a time when consumers wanted it to change. Of course, there were other factors as well. The disasters of the Black Death (1389) and the Great Schism both put the Church on wobbly ground. In the former case, the Church had no real answers in the face of so much death, and in the latter, it appeared, with multiple Popes running around, that the Church couldn't get its act together. And, of course, too many preachers had too many hands in the cookie jar - the wealth, the concubines, and other worldly trappings irritated a great many people. All of these things, undermined the core claim of the Church, and, to many people, it seemed that the Church really had no right to make any sort of judgement on technology at all.
Thus, the renaissance ensued, and with it, mankind took one step forward and, it now seems, one step back. The step forward was that technological adoption would no longer be slowed by an introspective and analytical type of people - the idea that the users of the technology would decide if it was worthy. Free trade and capitalism were ultimately born of an extension of this idea, that economic systems should be geared to giving as many people technology as possible. Guilds, and later unions, would all be swept away, and the rapidity of the adoption of technology is the sole means by which a man's modernity is judged. Those who would question a technology, are harshly judged.
This is just how guilds worked in Europe from about 800 AD until the industrial revolution...These were very meritocratic groups. Those who truly excelled would often form their own guilds, drawing talent away from the existing guild. Essentially, it's what we've seen in Silicon Valley over the past century.
Well, no. The guild system existed to restrain the flow of ideas and competition. The idea of the guild was to control all the knowledge in a particular craft to reduce competition. If you were in a glassblowers guild, you did not tell someone else how to blow glass, and you also worked to try and control production so that too much glass was not blown. So, they restrained knowledge and restrained trade. To some extent, the guilds also shared a common interest with the church. The guilds didn't want too much technological advance, and neither did the church, as the pace of change could well mean a loss of power for both, and ultimately did.
What killed the guilds? Free trade and the emergence of nation states over city states. The idea of copyrights and patents were promulgated by the emerging central governments to kill two birds with one stone. First, was to break the guilds, and the second, was promote freer trade. The idea of state funded educational centers did not help the guilds either. It actually wasn't that hard to learn how to blow some basic level of glass, for example, and so, once the guild system was broken, industrialization could take place, bringing further revenues to the crown. In this sense, craftsmen of the guilds began the transformation to employees of an emerging industry. It would take the idea of using investment capital to buy industrial machines that would ultimately make that transformation complete, so, in a sense, when Andrew Carnegie sent the Pinkertons in, he was ultimately breaking the guild system once and for all.
The emergence of labor unions, to a degree, could be seen as a response to the breaking of the guild system. Except that, labor unions could never monopolize knowledge of a particular skill the way the guilds did, because the companies owned all the big machines that needed to be learned (and they were rapidly obsolete anyway), and had to turn to other arguments to try and monopolize labor.
Microsoft open a development center in Vancouver because of Visa problems for foreign workers
One wonders why Microsoft would even bother. The USA is awash in illegal immigrants, and your Danish friend, Microsoft, and the United States at large would have been better off had your Danish friend just blown off the H1-B process and just got a job as an illegal alien.
If Windows doesn't play Galactica out of the box, then it is pretty frigging useless. I mean, it's Galactica we're talking about.
Counting the seconds until season 4.